It's #BlackFriday, but for us, it's the 2nd annual #BlackHoleFriday. Today, we'll post pics & info about black holes.
Tired from shopping? Maybe it's time to devour some snacks. Here's a black hole snacking on a star.
On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star. In one model, illustrated here, a sun-like star on an eccentric orbit plunges too close to its galaxy's central black hole. About half of the star's mass feeds an accretion disk around the black hole, which in turn powers a particle jet that beams radiation toward Earth.
Video credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab